Braids Equals Happiness
by Katherine Sanderson
Summary: Ed and Winry's daughter wants braids. Winry can't make braids, but Edward can. Oneshot.


AN: So this arose from my need to make Edward demonstrate his braidmaking skills in order to create family fluff. Then as someone who sucks at making braids (whether on myself or someone else) I made Winry unable to make them too. And because having a little sister and plenty of female friends growing up, while it did teach me _how_ to make braids, didn't teach me how to make them in any way presentable I figured I could make Winry, as someone I've never seen with braids herself or with someone else who has them - except Ed (I even double checked that her mother didn't have them) - even worse than me. I then added the Rule of Funny (even if I'm not sure how funny it's going to be since I was aiming more for fluffy and heartwarming) to that and that's how this fic was born.

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"What are you doing?"

Winry jerked her head up to glare at her husband where he stood in the doorway to their daughter's room. She was just about to snap at him to mind his own business when she took in the genuine confusion in his eyes and realised that he really didn't know what to make of the situation and wasn't trying to mock her. This just made her lower her head again and curl further into the ball she was trying to impersonate.

The situation was as follows: she was doing the aforementioned depressed ball-impression on the aforementioned daughter's bed while the aforementioned daughter was patting her head consolingly. The reason for this was that the hair of the younger of the two females currently occupying the bed looked like her mother had tried to braid it but failed miserably, panicked and tried to fix it by pulling it up in more and more ponytails that she'd then tried to weave together in a random fashion hoping to somehow make a braid out of the mess … which was exactly what had happened.

Winry had been elated when her daughter had come to ask her if she could braid her hair just like her friend Emilia's mother did for her. She had gushed so much it would have put Hughes to shame when she imagined her little girl in adorable braided pigtails. It was only after she had started that she realised she didn't know how to braid hair. She'd thought it couldn't be too hard seeing as Ed had kept his hair in a braid from when he was twelve to when he was sixteen but she found that she had been incorrect in this assumption.

Winry had grown up in a small rural community as the daughter of two doctors and the granddaughter of an automail mechanic. It was the sort of community where children went to school for only a short time and was then expected to take up their parents work or maybe seek an apprenticeship from one of the other people in Resembool if their skills proved to be unsuitable for the kind of work their own family did. Anyway, this resulted in Winry not having any real female friends growing up, especially as she'd always hung out with Ed and Al and the three of them had ended up as sort of the genius or prodigy trio that the other kids were reluctant to approach. Ed's temper and impatience in dealing with people who couldn't keep up with him didn't help matters either. As it were, this left Winry without any girlfriends on which to practise her braiding skills. She'd just never had a reason to try before now. She'd found putting her hair up in a ponytail to work just fine when she wanted it out of her face as well as much faster and less troublesome.

So now she was in this situation, curled up in a depressed ball on her daughter's bed over her inability to braid hair while her daughter tried her best to comfort her and her husband standing confused in the doorway.

"Nina?" Ed asked turning to the little blonde girl for answers as Winry clearly wasn't going to give them.

Nina looked up at him with impossibly innocent blue eyes. "Mommy tried to braid my hair," she simply stated.

"Ah geez," the golden eyed man sighed as he put together the situation.

Winry glanced up when the bed shifted as he sat down on the edge.

"Come here," he motioned to his daughter who scrambled off the bed to sit in his lap. "I'll do it."

Winry sat up and opened her mouth as if to protest before she caught sight of her daughter's surprised but elated smile and thought better of it. This wasn't about one automail mechanic's bruised ego after all, it was about said automails mechanic's much beloved daughter getting her hair braided. That said, Ed would definitely have to teach her after this, she would not take no for an answer.

"How did you even learn how to make braids anyway?" she asked as she watched him gently untangle their daughter's hair from the mess she had made. It was strange to think that she'd never thought to ask before when Ed's hair had first grown long enough during his automail rehabilitation but then again they'd had other things on their minds back then.

"Teacher taught us," he replied. "She would have us help with her braids sometimes. Well, more like she forced us to after I mocked them for the first time."

His eyes got slightly distant with memories as he no doubt thought about his time with one Izumi Curtis, housewife extraordinaire. Winry also thought back to the few times she'd met the frankly impressive woman. She couldn't imagine making braids that small. She might be skilled enough to handle all the delicate parts of automail creation and reparation but as she didn't know how to make braids at all yet (emphasis on yet, she would, after she managed to convince her absolutely lovely, wonderful, helpful husband to giving her some lessons) she had a feeling that being able to handle fiddly things wouldn't help her there. She was going to have to learn how to braid her daughter's hair with nice, normal, thick braids before she even thought about starting in on microbraids.

"Braiding my own hair wasn't really a challenge after that," Ed finished his explaination.

"Hmm, so Al also knows how to do this too then?" Winry commented after a brief pause as she observed Ed's big hands deftly manipulate Nina's hair into twin braids on either side of her head.

"Yeah, but he couldn't really do it with that suit of armor." The athmosphere lost most of its levity almost imidiately. Most of the guilt about what had transpired back then was gone now but a tiny bit of it still lingered and probably always would and bringing it up always brought a bit of tenstion. Winry always picked up on it but never mentioned it anymore. "Still, I bet he's had use of that now with May." And just like that the lightheartedness of the situation was back and Winry returned her husband's mischievous smile with one of her own.

She leaned into him and put her head on his shoulder and her smile changed to a fond one. It was moments like these that made her think the world wasn't such a harsh and unforgiving place. The kind of place were two boys, not even in their teens yet, could be punished so horribly just because they wanted their mother back. The kind of place where parents, siblings and children could go off to war and never return. The kind of place where there could even _be_ a war over something as trivial as differences in opinion.

Still in this moment she was content. She was completely at ease as she watched her husband braid their daughters hair and their son was probably still out with his friends. In this moment she was happy.

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